This Oscar-nominated documentary from rising British star Lucy Walker (Blindsight) starts by looking at Vik Muniz, a Brazilian artist who makes monumental sculptures out of materials gleaned from the world’s largest rubbish heap, near Rio. An entire underclass relies on this landfill, scavenging to survive, and Walker finds inspiration and strange beauty in the squalor.

Waste Land:Seven Magazine review, by Mike McCahill

Seven rating: * * *

Lucy Walker’s Oscar-nominated documentary profiles Vik Muniz, the Brazilian artist and photographer who uses everyday items as raw materials: his latest project centres on the Jardin Gramacho, a Rio refuse dump so vast it has its own community of foragers and gleaners, sorting the recyclable wheat from the festering chaff.

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Here, millionaires’ detritus gets junked alongside cast-offs from the favelas: it’s a level playing field, or would be, if the landfill didn’t threaten to subside whenever anyone set foot upon it.

We’re watching disadvantaged subjects with mountains to climb, and the footage of the pickers navigating these towering peaks makes for compelling viewing – you grow increasingly concerned about the absence of health and safety.

It’s enough to make us think about the consequences of our culture of disposability, even while Muniz’s project is encouraging the workers to leave Gramacho behind.

As one forager confesses, once ensconced in the studio: “I don’t want to go back.”

The camera sticks to those selected for Muniz’s portraits – the elder statesman battling lung cancer, the young mothers who’ve left families behind them – catching both what it is to be there whenever bin bags rain down off the trucks and, later, the perception-shift forced upon those seeing their hardscrabble life transformed into marketable art.

Throughout, Walker insists on letting the artist’s subjects speak for themselves: the result is a chance to hear rubbish pickers discuss the relative merits of Marat and Machiavelli, and an insight into the creation of a modern art that is edifying, humane and borne of pure rubbish.